Storytelling
Whilst it is helpful to provide facts and figures to inform and persuade your audience, this often isn’t enough. Through storytelling, your content can appeal to the emotional and human reader. The idea is that telling a story holds the real power to change someone’s mind. Appealing to the emotional and personal side of content writing makes your brand more memorable, building trust and brand awareness. Thus, it is a useful persuasive content tactic to have in your toolkit.
As detailed in this Moz article, based on ‘The Story Factor’ by Annette Simmons, there are 6 types of stories you can tell in your content.
The ‘who am I?’ and ‘why am I here?’ stories are beneficial in establishing a groundwork and building trust in your readers. By showing your human and personal side, your audience will be able to find common ground with you. These are often demonstrated in your home, about and team pages. By sharing your story and showing the human side to your business, you can show your audience your motivations and that you’re not in it for yourself.
‘The Vision’ type of stories shows what’s in it for the audience. The home page is the perfect place to show your vision for your company. Whether that be how your company has overcome obstacles in the past, or where a problem your company aims to solve no longer exists. You should also elaborate and reinforce your vision throughout your website, such as within product descriptors. This type of storytelling should shape your audience’s expectations of what life could be like if they use your products.
‘Teaching’ stories are where you’re not trying to sell anything, but rather to be informative and provide a new way of thinking about the work you do. Teaching stories can provide the opportunity to learn from a mistake without ever having to make it. You can also use this type of storytelling shape your audience’s understanding of the potential solutions available to them.
‘Values in Action’ stories are like ‘vision’ and ‘teaching’ stories’, but they focus on the core values you want to reinforce. Focusing on positive stories helps show your company’s key values. By giving useful examples of where you have put your values to use, you can show your audience that you’re serious about maintaining your core principles.
Finally, ‘I know what you’re thinking’ stories allow you to expect an objection from your audience and get ahead of it. You can neutralise any concerns without them ever actually getting raised. A good way of doing this is through testimonials or case studies. This puts in the proof that your company does live up to the hype and expectations you have set out.
As SEO specialists, we understand the importance of using SEO techniques to achieve digital marketing success. Where SEO is all about technicalities and algorithms, storytelling is an emotive and more human approach to creating content. Storytelling bridges the gap between what people want to see and what search engines want to see. Whereas SEO ranking factors help put you in view of your audience, storytelling keeps the reader’s attention. By appealing to people, rather than technological data, your brand will enjoy the memorable and emotional attachment they can cling onto.
There are several ways having quality storytelling can benefit your SEO and enhances its efficiency. For example:
Click Through Rates measure how many people choose your site over other options. Having a trusted and recognised brand is key to this. People are more likely to click on a brand they’re familiar with. Through having quality storytelling, you will be able to relate to your reader on a more personable level. This will make your brand more memorable, increasing your chances of people choosing you over others. Our experience in PPC Management Services can also help you increase your CTR, as this is one of our core expertise.
User engagement measures how long people stay on your site and visit more than one page. Engaging the reader in a story is more likely to hook them in and suck them into your content. By getting your reader to engage more with your website, this will improve the way search engines view your content. Thus, enhancing your search engine rankings.
Building backlinks from other sites act as a seal of approval for your company. Storytelling helps build your brand awareness, making your company more memorable. If people trust you then they will want to link and share your content. This acts in a similar way to building your social media presence. Although your social media presence doesn’t directly affect your SEO, it helps in promoting your content. People are likely to share content they resonate with on a personal and emotional level. So, excellent storytelling is more attractive for sharing on social media. Thus, reaching a wider audience, leading to more clicks and conversions.
A strong sense of storytelling gives your content universal appeal. Thus, with more social media sharing and backlinks, this broadens the places from which traffic can reach you. Google’s algorithm allows them to see where your traffic is coming from. This allows them to rank sites based on the diversity of where their traffic is coming from.
There is no doubt that storytelling and SEO are intrinsic to benefit your brand. Knowing the different types of stories and how these benefit your SEO are important to ensuring your content is performing as it should be.
If you would like to find out more about our copywriting services and how we can help you achieve quality storytelling, please feel free to get in touch. Contact us using the quick call back form below, by sending an email to [email protected] or call for a chat on 01524 566 736.